Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.

But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.

I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.

The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.

So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.